Andrew Peters’ Blog

Home coffee finally reaches acceptable levels!

Kit:

- Rancilio Silvia
- Rancilio Rocky
- Caffe L’affare Primo

Yum!

Dave Newman has created a cool NHaml syntax highlighting add-in for Visual Studio. Thanks Dave and keep up the good work!

Quite a few people have asked me how to use NHaml outside of ASP.NET MVC. Here’s how to do it:

1) Create your project and add a reference to MvcContrib.NHamlViewEngine
2) Use code like the following to compile and render a template.

var templateCompiler = new TemplateCompiler();
var viewType = templateCompiler.Compile("MyTemplate.haml");		
var view = (ICompiledView)Activator.CreateInstance(viewType);
 
string output = view.Render();

In this case the haml template is located in the same folder as the application.

As always, a good way to figure this stuff out is to take a look at the unit tests. In this case I copied the code verbatim from the NHaml TestFixtureBase class.

Today we were proud to announce the release of WPF Elements, a collection of foundational WPF components, missing from the built-in controls that ship with WPF, but no less essential in the toolbox of any self-respecting WPF developer.

The controls, crafted with care by our resident WPF guru and C# MVP, include:

• WPF Multicolumn TreeView control (aka WPF TreeListView)
• WPF Currency Text box (supports cultures too, passes the Turkey test)
• WPF Integer Text box
• WPF Numeric Text box
• WPF Masked Text box
• WPF DateTimePicker
• WPF DropDownDatePicker
• WPF MonthCalendar
• WPF Spin control (aka up-down control)
• WPF SpinDecorator
• WPF DropDownEditBox
• WPF ProportionalStackPanel

So download the trial and enjoy.

We’re getting close to releasing version 2.0 of our LightSpeed O/RM and so are kicking off a beta program so people can kick the tires.

The key feature of LightSpeed 2 is obviously support for LINQ querying. For 2.0 we’re concentrating on complete feature parity in terms of query expressiveness with LightSpeed 1.0. Our vision for LightSpeed is unchanged: The simplest, fastest and most lightweight O/RM for .NET - The right balance of power vs. complexity.

It’s not only the LINQ support in version 2 either. We’re going to release the first iteration of our code generation toolset. The first version will include a template based tool (both command line and GUI) that generates LightSpeed model classes from an existing database schema. Long term we’re looking at moving the tooling into Visual Studio and supporting bidirectional generation. Of course, we’re always keen to hear what people are after in this area.

If your interested in participating in the beta please go ahead and sign up